青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

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Leo Lionni and His Circle of Friends

Price:
3,182 yen (JPY)
Author(s):
Matsuoka Kiyoko and Moriizumi Ayami
Language(s):
Japanese
Size:
257 × 182 × 19.5 mm, 660 g
Pages:
288
Binding:
softcover
Release date:
20241120
ISBN:
978-4-86152-976-4 C0071

Italy and the US, art and design, “Art” and “art”: Follow the story of Leo Lionni, who struggled to negotiate between worlds—and who lived as a hub linking them all.

As the author of such picture books as Swimmy and Little Blue and Little Yellow Leo Lionni (1910–1999) is beloved by young and old the world over, including Japan. His career in art sprang into motion through an encounter with the practitioners of the Futurist movement in Italy, following which he worked as an art director in the United States; in his later years he pursued his creative activities while alternating between the United States and Italy, the land that always remained closest to his heart.

Over a career spanning multiple genres—advertising, art, sculpture, picture books—Lionni’s passion for creation never faded, as this book reveals including through roughly 300 works and the fruits of decades of research on the artist by the Itabashi Art Museum in Tokyo. Works by Bruno Munari, Ben Shahn, Eric Carle, and other artists as well as accounts of their close association with Lionni additionally illuminate his relationship with his times.

Itabashi Art Museum director Matsuoka Kiyoko joined the museum as a curator in 1986 upon completing graduate studies at Chiba University. She has organized numerous exhibitions at the museum related to design and picture books, including, since 1989, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition in Japan. She served on the executive committee of the International Board of Books for Young People (IBBY) from 2010 to 2014 and was jury president for the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award in 2014 . She has juried the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition, the Biennale of Illustrations in Bratislava, and the Golden Pinwheel Young Illustrators Competition (Shanghai) and regularly conducts workshops and other activities both in Japan and abroad.

Moriizumi Ayami earned a master’s degree in comparative literature and culture from the University of Tokyo before receiving a grant from the Italian government in 1988 to travel to Italy, where she graduated from the University of Bologna. She has served as coordinator for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition in Japan since 1990 in addition to creating a documentary on the event; she has also coordinated and curated Japanese showings of such artists as Bruno Munari and contributed an essay to Leo Lionni: Storyteller, Artist, Designer (2023), published in conjunction with the first major retrospective on Leo Lionni in the United States. Now resident in Rome, she holds workshops in Italy to promote Japanese culture through picture books and language lessons for children while working in Japan to share Italian methods of creating tactile illustrated books.

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